The Brain research of Torment
There is one spot in which one’s protection, closeness, uprightness and sacredness are ensured – one’s body, a novel sanctuary and a recognizable region of sensa and individual history. The torturer attacks, debases and taints this sanctuary. He does so freely, purposely, over and again and, frequently, cruelly and physically, with undisguised joy. Consequently the all-unavoidable, durable, and, regularly, irreversible impacts and results of torment.
As it were, the torment casualty’s own body is delivered his more terrible foe. Physical anguish urges the victim to transform, his character to piece, his beliefs and standards to disintegrate. The body turns into an accessory of the victimizer, a uninterruptible channel of correspondence, a treacherous, harmed region.
It cultivates an embarrassing reliance of the manhandled on the culprit. Real necessities denied – rest, latrine, food, water – are wrongly seen by the casualty as the immediate reasons for his debasement and dehumanization. From his perspective, he is delivered savage not by the cruel domineering jerks around him but rather by his own tissue.

The idea of “body” can without much of a stretch be reached out to “family”, or “home”. Torment is frequently applied to family and kith, comrades, or associates. This plans to upset the progression of “environmental factors, propensities, appearance, relations with others”, as the CIA put it in one of its manuals. A feeling of durable self-personality relies significantly upon the natural and the persistent. By going after both one’s natural body and one’s “social body”, the casualty’s mind is stressed to the mark of separation.
Beatrice Patsalides portrays this change accordingly in “Morals of the unspeakable: Torment survivors in psychoanalytic treatment”:
“As the hole between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ develops, separation and distance increment. The subject that, under torment, was constrained into the place of unadulterated article has lost their feeling of interiority, closeness, and security. Time is capable now, in the present just, and point of view – that which considers a feeling of relativity – is dispossessed. Considerations and dreams assault the brain and attack the body as though the defensive skin that typically contains our contemplations, gives us breathing in the middle of between the idea and the thing being pondered, and isolates among inside and outside, over a wide span of time, me and you, was lost.”
Torment denies the casualty of the most essential methods of connecting with the real world and, subsequently, is what could be compared to mental passing. Reality are distorted by lack of sleep. The self (“I”) is broken. The tormented have nothing recognizable to clutch: family, home, individual effects, friends and family, language, name. Continuously, they lose their psychological versatility and feeling of opportunity. They feel outsider – unfit to convey, relate, append, or understand others.
Torment fragments youth self important egotistical dreams of uniqueness, power, insusceptibility, and solidness. Yet, it improves the dream of consolidation with a romanticized and supreme (however not harmless) other – the inflicter of desolation. The twin cycles of individuation and detachment are turned around.
Torment is a definitive demonstration of debased closeness. The torturer attacks the casualty’s body, infests his mind, and has his brain. Denied of contact with others and starved for human associations, the prey bonds with the hunter. “Awful holding”, similar to the capture-bonding, is about trust and the quest for significance in the severe and unconcerned and terrible universe of the dungeon.
The victimizer turns into the dark opening at the focal point of the casualty’s dreamlike cosmic system, sucking in the victim’s widespread requirement for comfort. The casualty attempts to “control” his victimizer by becoming one with him (introjecting him) and by engaging the beast’s apparently lethargic humankind and compassion.
This holding is major areas of strength for particularly the torturer and the tormented structure a dyad and “team up” in the ceremonies and demonstrations of torment (for example, when the casualty is pressured into choosing the torment carries out and the sorts of torture to be caused, or to pick between two disasters).
A further indecency of torment is the reversal it makes of personal human connections. The cross examination is a type of social experience wherein the ordinary guidelines of conveying, of relating, of closeness are controlled. Reliance needs are evoked by the examiner, however not so they might be met as in cozy connections, yet to debilitate and confound. Freedom that is given as a trade off for ‘selling out’ is obviously false. Quietness is deliberately confounded either as affirmation of data or as culpability for ‘complicity’.
Torment joins total embarrassing openness with absolute destroying detachment. The end results and result of torment are a scarred and frequently broke casualty and an unfilled presentation of the fiction of force.”
In some cases the casualty comes to need torment – especially as self-mutilators do – in light of the fact that it is a proof and a sign of his individuated presence in any case obscured by the perpetual torment. Torment safeguards the victim from breaking down and capitulation. It saves the veracity of his unimaginable and unspeakable encounters.
This double course of the casualty’s estrangement and dependence on misery supplements the culprit’s perspective on his quarry as “brutal”, or “subhuman”. The torturer takes on the place of the sole power, the restrictive wellspring of importance and understanding, the wellspring of both shrewd and great.
Torment is tied in with reconstructing the casualty to capitulate to an elective exposition of the world, proffered by the victimizer. It is a demonstration of profound, permanent, horrible teaching. The manhandled likewise gulps down and acclimatizes the torturer’s negative perspective on him and frequently, subsequently, is delivered self-destructive, foolish, or reckless.